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GDC Dev Days deliver fresh insights from top game tech companies!

By Staff | February 14, 2019

As you're gearing up for the 2019 Game Developers Conference next month, organizers would like to quickly let you know about some of the great day-long sponsored Developer Days you can enjoy during the show!

All Developer Day sessions take place during the first two days of GDC (Monday and Tuesday, March 18th and 19th) and offer cutting-edge insight and opportunities to learn from some of the top companies in the industry.

Here's a sample of what's in store for you during the GDC 2019 Developer Days, served up in an easy-to-read list format. A number of companies are presenting Dev Day sessions this year, and today we're excited to highlight offerings from Google, Autodesk, Xsolla, Substance, and The Khronos Group:

Google

Building Successful Monetization and Growth Strategies: Hear how top game developers challenge traditional mobile game business models and find success through diversifying their revenue streams. This session will also look at ways to build communities and cover the latest growth and monetization tools to help you find and keep high-value players.

Building on Android: This technical session will cover Android tools and tips to optimize your mobile game's performance for the best possible player experience. Learn strategies for diagnosing library problems, how to spot bugs and identify root causes, as well as how games can be optimized for large screen devices, like Chromebooks, to improve engagement and reach new audiences.

Create, Connect, and Scale with Google: In this four-part session, you'll cover a variety of ways to reach new audiences with your games. Hear about expanding to emerging markets, developing immersive AR experiences, designing voice games for the Google Assistant platform, and how to grow your game and improve the player experience with Firebase.

Tools and Best Practices to Improve Discovery and Game Quality:Learn about the latest tools, services, and best practices to help distribute mobile games on Google Play. You'll examine how to create high quality games using Android vitals, improve player conversion with Google Play Instant, and build effective pre-launch strategies to maximize the lifetime value of your players.

Autodesk

3ds Max: What's New and What's to Come: Get an exclusive sneak peek of the latest advancements in 3ds Max from the Autodesk product leadership team, meet the Autodesk team and be part of the conversation.

Autodesk & Unity: Powering Immersive Experiences with Connected Workflows:For over a year, Unity and Autodesk have collaborated to build more connected workflows between Autodesk 3D tools and the Unity engine. In this session, Autodesk and Unity will give an update on that relationship, what new work has been done to improve the interop between our tools and what we're exploring for the future.

Sony Santa Monica Presents: God of War:See a first-hand example of how animation performance in Maya accelerated workflows for artists at a major AAA game studio, and learn how they can be applied in other cases at other studios.

Shotgun for Production Management in Games: Keeping track of assets, project status, and reviews is a huge challenge in games. Shotgun is a review and production tracking toolset well known for helping creative teams deliver blockbuster films, epic TV shows, and AAA games. In this session, we will cover the latest updates to Shotgun for games and hear how it has impacted the efficiency of some of the world's biggest studios.

Xsolla

A Game Dev's Guide to Life Beyond Credit Cards & Major eWallets:In an era of global game publishing, extending one's reach can be tough, particularly as a smaller studio. Xsolla will help attendees expand to geographies that they never thought of with hyper-localized customer buying experiences guaranteeing increased market share and conversion. Learn about nuanced payment habits and local payment options that are gaining traction in key gaming markets.

Content Design & Marketing Tactics for Successful Pre-Order Campaigns: This talk will help attendees understand how to create and execute successful pre-order campaigns -- demonstrating best practices and case studies across founder and pre-order packages, bundle content and pricing, marketing activities, upselling, sales, discounts and how to work with existing crowdfunding campaign backers.

Game Publishing 3.0: Battle Testing Your Business Model Pre-Launch: When it comes to publishing advice, one mantra you hear often is to "start your marketing early." However, rarely do you hear "start your monetization early." This talk will get you up to speed on pre-launch strategy and help you enerate early indicators to tune your marketing, optimize your sales funnel, and ultimately make more money both pre-release and at launch.

Learn How to Up Your Game: Empowering Developers Everywhere: It's never been easier to make a game, but the barriers to success have never been so high. How can you take control of your own destiny? Xsolla GM & CMO Nathalie Lubensky will show you how by drawing from over 20 years of creating exceptional and memorable customer experiences. This kick-off talk will give you the confidence to self-publish, launch your dream game to the right audience, own your customer, and create a global brand — without breaking the bank.

Maximizing the Influencer Potential for Your Game: Influencer marketing has become an essential part of marketing for many games today, and a vital source of growth for some. In this talk, Xsolla will discuss how to position a game for influencer success.

Untapped Opportunities: Funding Beyond Friends & Family: Tired of self-funding? Come learn about different sources of funding one may not have known existed. With a wider network and a customized pitch, odds of funding success can increase substantially. Xsolla team members will cover where and when to reach out to make the magic happen.

The Khronos Group

Bringing Fortnite to Mobile with Vulkan and OpenGL ES: The session will cover the challenges faced in bringingFortnite Battle Royale to Android devices using Vulkan and OpenGL ES, optimization strategies, performance and memory trade offs, plus content changes and implementation details Epic used to get the most out of the mobile graphics APIs as implemented in modern Android mobile devices. Making Use of New Vulkan Features: Join this session to learn about recently released Vulkan features that have been driven by developer feedback. This session is comprised of 3 smaller topics each delivered by a different speaker (from AMD, Gaijin Entertainment, and Samsung) and focused on specific new features that are targeted at real world use cases!OpenXR: The State of the Union: Come for an understanding of how OpenXR approaches future proofing and cross-platform compatibility, and some of the changes that applications must make to fit in. Additionally, Khronos will talk about how new and existing hardware fits into the ecosystem.Ubisoft's Experience Developing with Vulkan: Come hear Ubisoft's Jean-Noe Morissette talk about his experience developing with Vulkan! From shader compilers to pipeline caches, Jean-Noe will share thoughts and perspectives on working with ecosystem tools and the Vulkan API. Contrasting Vulkan with DX12 will highlight practical concerns when porting projects to Vulkan.Vulkan: The State of the Union: Over the past three years Vulkan has become the world's leading cross-platform, low-overhead graphics and compute API. In this session, Khronos will check in on the state of the Vulkan universe and review the latest developments in the standard and the ecosystem.glTF and WebGL: This session will present the current state of both the WebGL API and glTF file format. The latest features of both will be demonstrated, as well as how each is being used in the wild. The glTF roadmap will be covered including next-generation materials and compressed texture transmission (CTTF).

Substance

Substance Days Keynote: Adobe's SébastienDeguy will kickstart The Substance Day at GDC 2019 by sharing some updates on the latest news in the Substance world. This session will highlight some great upcoming features for Substance Painter and Substance Designer, and will also present some exciting news about Substance Alchemist!

Marvel's Spider-Man: A Deep Dive into the Look Creation of Manhattan: Focusing on the art side of creating Insomniac Games' 2018 hit Marvel's Spider-Man, Insomniac's Matt McAuliffe, Brian Mullen and Ryan Benno will take deep dives into how each department handled the creation of materials, textures, models, set dressing and lighting across the entire city of Manhattan, and how all of these assets came together.

Texturing the World of Assassin's Creed Odyssey:Ubisoft Quebec's Vincent Dérozier and Pierre Fleau will take you through the complete production of the materials of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. From conception to pre-production and production, learn what defines the artistic direction of such textures, and how technical elements of the pipeline and workflow were built using the Substance suite.

The Division 2: A World of Materials: This talk will cover The Division 2’s material creation workflow and tools pipeline. The speakers will discuss the philosophy of creating a curated library of materials from scratch using Substance Designer. They will also shed some light on their proprietary Substance toolset, and how they designed a flexible engine integration for Substance files.

Creating Hard Surface Materials in Substance Designer: During this talk, WB Games Montreals Jonathan Benainous will present two personal projects. Giving a detailed breakdown of these hard surface materials, he will assist the audience in studying the key steps involved in creating an intricate Baroque Ceiling & a Damaged Painted Wall in Substance Designer.

For more details on these promising sponsored sessions and countless other great talks, head over to the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler! There you can begin to lay out your GDC 2019, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.​